Book review: India and the Islamic heartlands: an Eighteenth-Century world of circulation and exchange by Gagan D.S. Sood

Drawing on the chance discovery of a number of letters exchanged during the period, in India and the Islamic Heartlands: An Eighteenth-Century World of Circulation and Exchange author Gagan D.S. Sood attempts to capture the lives of ordinary people to reconstruct the connective tissues of a world lived beyond the purview of the sovereign. While the nature of the source material occasionally limits the book’s scope of analysis, this work successfully weaves together an insightful narrative to draw attention to a neglected arena and period, finds Mithilesh Kumar Jha

Book review: Benign violence: education in and beyond the age of reason by Ansgar Allen

In Benign Violence: Education In and Beyond the Age of Reason, Ansgar Allen challenges the view that education is, at its core, an incontestable social good by outlining how its structures are underpinned by systemic violence. While Allen’s argument may not entirely sway readers away from the overarchingly positive value typically attributed to education, it nonetheless asks serious questions about the role that the education system and examinations have played in shaping us and our world, writes Mithilesh Kumar Jha

Book review: performing politics: media interviews, debates and press conferences by Geoffrey Craig

In Performing Politics: Media Interviews, Debates and Press Conferences, Geoffrey Craig examines media interactions between politicians and journalists as power struggles that have come to be seen as crucial in indicating the potential success and competence of political leaders. While the book understands politics through largely conventional terms that bypass the emergence of newer political movements, it nonetheless serves to promote greater literacy and understanding of contemporary political communication and the battlegrounds therein, writes Mithilesh Kumar Jha

An Experimental Study of Hydraulic Jump Due to Moving Jet Impingement

The objective of this project work is to study experimentally the hydraulic jump with a moving jet impingement on a glass plate surface. The jet strikes the horizontally placed glass plate and the jump occur which is investigated with different flow rate and discussed here in detail. Hydraulic jump of two different variety has been observed in this study when jet is stationary with respect to horizontal glass plate and moving. When jet is stationary with higher angle of jet inclination, smooth curve is appeared at the jump location, and for lower angle of jet inclination, curve with sharp change in profile is observed. Radius of hydraulic jump and the profile formed due to variation in flow rate are studied experimentally. When jet is in still condition we found that the radius of hydraulic jump increases with the flow rate and elliptical shape is formed due to jet inclination and when it moves normally with respect to horizontal glass plate a semicircular shape occur in the direction of jet movement. The result are found out for hydraulic jump with variation of flow rate through graph and validate with existing results of literature. The jet is moved by the means of slider crank mechanis

Novel Dual Band Frequency Selective Surface and its Applications on the Gain Improvements of Compact UWB Monopole Antenna

In this work, a highly directional ultra-wideband (UWB) microstrip patch antenna as a single-element is suggested. The proposed antenna’s gain is enhanced with a novel dual-band frequency selective surface (FSS) placed beneath it. The FSS design has a hexagonal structure with meander line inductances and a capacitance-like structure connecting all of the corners to the middle. There is no metallic layer on the other side of the substrate, which shows transmission zeros at 4.95 GHz and 12.7 GHz, and a modified U-shaped monopole antenna is developed. First, the performance characteristics of the antenna and FSS are analyzed from the simulation results, and they are validated experimentally after fabrication, followed by measurement. The compact configuration comprises an antenna loaded with the proposed FSS results S11 less than -10 dB from 3.15 GHz to 22.65 GHz, covering the UWB band together with the X, Ku-band with a bandwidth of 19.5 GHz (151.16% FBW). The antenna’s overall physical dimensions would be 38.8 mm×38.8 mm×25.2 mm (0.407λo×0.407λo×0.265λo), with λo denoting the lowest frequency’s free-space wavelength. The FSS loading results in a 9.9 dBi maximum gain at 10 GHz. The antenna’s small size increases bandwidth, and its high peak gain makes it ideal for use in real-time applications

Compact UWB Monopole Antenna with Tunable Dual Band Notched Characteristics for WiMAX and WLAN Applications

The present work shows a planar compact ultra-wideband (UWB) monopole antenna with controllable dualband-notch frequencies at 3.3 GHz for WiMAX and 5 GHz for WLAN. In the proposed antenna, the lower notchband (at a frequency of 3.3 GHz) is made by cutting a thin horizontal strip on top of the radiating patch. The uppernotch band (at a frequency of 5 GHz) is made by putting two narrow parasitic strips in the shape of an “I” oneither side of the radiating patch. The incorporation of three varactor diodes between the radiating patch and three metallic strips provides the flexibility of adjusting the notch frequencies. The notch band tunability between 3.15 GHz and 3.69 GHz and between 4.93 GHz and 5.59 GHz, respectively, is achieved by changing the bias voltageof the varactor diode between 0 V and 30 V. The gain and efficiency characteristics of the designed antenna alsoexhibit band rejection at the respective notch frequencies. The design principle is validated by fabricating andmeasuring a prototype of the proposed dual-band, notched UWB antenna. For three different bias voltages of thevaractor, the simulated and experimental findings are in reasonable agreement. The proposed works demonstratebetter-notch characteristics as compared with other reported works over the UWB rang

Faster Exact and Parameterized Algorithm for Feedback Vertex Set in Tournaments

A tournament is a directed graph T such that every pair of vertices is connected by an arc. A feedback vertex set is a set S of vertices in T such that TS is acyclic. In this article we consider the FEEDBACK VERTEX SET problem in tournaments. Here the input is a tournament T and an integer k, and the task is to determine whether T has a feedback vertex set of size at most k. We give a new algorithm for FEEDBACK VERTEX SET IN TOURNAMENTS. The running time of our algorithm is upper-bounded by O(1.6181^k + n^{O(1)}) and by O(1.466^n). Thus our algorithm simultaneously improves over the fastest known parameterized algorithm for the problem by Dom et al. running in time O(2^kk^{O(1)} + n^{O(1)}), and the fastest known exact exponential-time algorithm by Gaspers and Mnich with running time O(1.674^n). On the way to proving our main result we prove a strengthening of a special case of a graph partitioning theorem due to Bollobas and Scott. In particular we show that the vertices of any undirected m-edge graph of maximum degree d can be colored white or black in such a way that for each of the two colors, the number of edges with both endpoints of that color is between m/4-d/2 and m/4+d/2